Some days you just need a break from the monotony! Preparing for exams, transitioning to a new unit, days when half your students are gone for a basketball tour
Reading for school is the WOOOORRRSSSTTTTT. Alice Oseman is the 20-year old author of Solitaire and she understands that sometimes...
In first grade reading comprehension is something new, challenging, and difficult to teach because even though they’re all 6 or 7 they’re developmentally so different. Head over to my blog to get this comprehension page. Depending on what grade you teach it’d be great for: homework individual assessment small groups partners intervention challenging gifted students ... Read More about Reading Comprehension
While not necessarily "un-schoolers", we ARE eclectic homeschoolers. And with that title comes ALL forms of learning...including a little bit of un-schooling or as I like to call it..."schooling at the speed of summer." Our official last day may have marked the end of assignments and schedules, but, it did not put a three-month halt to our learning. On the contrary, there is plenty o' schoolin' going on 'round here. It's just been slowed from a gallop to a trot. It's intentionally more leisurely. It's purposefully more gentle. Here's what our days look like during the sunshine months. Devotions For the summer, we pack away the Good Morning Board. Although we obviously still have breakfast and still get dressed, our morning routine is less planned than during the fall and winter. We do still make devotions a morning-time-MUST, however. The older three kids and I read from our individual Bibles and devotional books and then, we each take rotating turns reading a picture Bible story to the two youngest. Pleasure Reading In addition to our daily read-aloud for the month, my oldest three boys have to read out loud to me for at least 15 minutes each day. This not only gets them closer to their summer-reading-program goals, but it also maintains constant reading practice throughout the summer. My daughter, ever the book-a-holic, is rarely without a book in her hands. So, although I encourage her to read at least 15 minutes a day, it is really more of a obligatory request. As is our summer-time custom, we often allow all the kids to stay up past bedtime to read. The extra-long daylight makes it nearly impossible for them to fall asleep at the normal time anyway. So, the Hubs and I like to capitalize on the lengthier days by instituting the following late night reading rules. You have to be in bed at the normal time...8:00 at our house. You may read books, look at picture books (for those too young to read), or listen to audio books...for one hour. If you get out of bed for any reason other than an emergency, you forfeit your reading time and have to go right to bed. An extra late bedtime AND a whole hour of uninterrupted reading time! A win-win for everyone. Summer Science Project Since we spend six months of our traditional school year buried by snow, it is difficult for us to pursue any biological themes for science...at least the ones that are shaded in GREEN. For this reason, we have always chosen one particular element of nature to study during the summer months. As with any delight-directed learning, I left this year's science project choice up to the kids. After some brainstorming and a quick family vote, they decided that this summer we'd focus our science efforts on WEATHER. A couple of times each week will find us reading great weather-themed living literature books conducting weather-related experiments recording the temperature and cloud patterns of the day on a calendar using weather instruments and tools Who knows? We may even end our study by making a celebratory cloud cake! Discovery Basket Time So far, our summer days have been more mobile than in year's past. Since we are in the process of trying to sell our house, we have not been at home very often...requiring a more flexible schedule. So, while we haven't been able to enjoy our discovery quiet time EVERY day, we have tried to sneak it in whenever possible. Individual Interests Summer...with its fun-in-the-sun-laziness...has always been a great time for my children to explore individualized extra-curricular interests. Because the season is short, the commitment is minimal. I might not be able to taxi my daughter to three-day-a-week basketball practices ALL WINTER LONG...but, I CAN commit to chartering her to a morning basketball camp for one week in the summer. In addition to free weeklong swimming lessons offered by our local YMCA that my oldest three participated in the very first week of summer vacation, here's what my kids have chosen for their own personal summer learning. Sweetie Pea "Mommy's Helper" for a family friend once a week week-long morning basketball camp two-day sewing camp for girls offered by some wonderful women at our church Super Boy Alert Cadet training with dad nearly-free weekly guitar lessons offered as a ministry from our church's children's ministry assistant bi-weekly art lessons with an exceptional retired art teacher in our area Blonde Warrior AND Greased Lightning twice-a-week morning T-ball at a local park While I love the vigorous learning that takes place during the school year, I also enjoy the "exhale"-style schooling that happens during the summer months. The organic kind...the slow-down kind...the GENTLE kind. So, that's what our summer learning plans look like. How about yours?
This free focus on close reading resource helps you teach students about how to monitor for meaning as they read.rn
A post with a FREEBIE to help families with what questions to ask about reading at home with their students. This powerful resource is a game changer!
Cultivate lifelong reading skills.
Made by _viva.licious_ on insta!! Feel free to message me with what you made I’d love to see it! https://www.instagram.com/_viva.licious_?igsh=bDZmenp1bnJ5ZHNl PS I messed up on the bangs lol ur gonna have to adjust those sorry I own all art used in this picrew, while you’re free to make an oc out of it, you are not allowed to sell/trade my art. This picrew is non-commercial!! My th is https://toyhou.se/TheMeowstermind Thanks for reading and have fun ❤️
Use different sentence frames to increase text connections. Help students
Decoding drills for building fluency helps students apply phonics skills when reading. Perfect warm ups and a great tracking tool, too.
You spend hours marking and commenting on student work, and then they don't even read your feedback. The solution is all in how you time it.
STEM picture books with reviews! Great STEM books for kids to inspire.
I’ve been spending a ton of time this summer working with groups around the country, helping facilitate conversations around reading and writing in the social studies. It’s always a goo…
Pass them on to your first grade teacher friends!
I'll reveal an embarrassing fact about myself. The people that work at the print counter at Office Max know me. I'm mean really know me. I coached the new guy on how to find the right barcode in his binder, so I could check out the last time I went. (Yesterday.) As in, they even recognize my husband because I send him over there a bunch to pick stuff up for me. (I have a nice husband.) I'm at the print counter at Office Max waaaaaay too often. Here's the thing, though. You know how you see a poster at the teacher store, and it's almost what you want? And you're thinking to yourself, "Gosh, if it just said _____________ instead, it would be perfect!" This happens to me often, especially with writing. We use Lucy Calkins' Units of Study for writing, and let me tell you, there are no Lucy Calkins teaching posters at Lakeshore. Yes, I could make it on chart paper. But I can't. Because I expect my posters to look like this: I Do, We Do, You Do The First Grade Parade Working for the Classroom The Inspired Apple And they never do. Ever. So what's an OCD girl to do but make them herself on the computer? If you have the newest version of Word, you can do some snazzy stuff. Check out this post I read on Teaching Blog Addict that tells how to use Word to make a blog button: Blog Button in 3 Tutorials. You can make some good looking graphic work. I didn't know about all this business in the newest Word, but I do have Printshop. I even recently downloaded Photoshop Elements. I love it, but it's a bit of a time commitment to figure it out. So go create your 11x17 file in one of these programs and get to the next step. Moving right along. At Office Max or Office Depot, you can upload a file to their website (or bring in a flash drive), and they'll print out an 11x17 color poster on nice, glossy card stock for you. For less than $2. Seriously. It works like this: After that, you put in your name/number/etc. and then select which store you want to pick it up from. Office Depot's process works EXACTLY the same, except you also have the option to pay online. I'm sure Staples has something similar. Sadly, no Staples near me. Try it out for yourself! Here are two posters I've made: Plot Poster Love **To download, click on the name of the file (shown above the image). The link will open and just click download. Voila! Happy poster making!
Understanding characters can be tricky! Learn my favorite strategies for helping students master character traits and changes.
Looking for a book list for making inferences and predictions? Here you go! Be sure to check out all the book lists I have for teaching comprehension. *This post contains affiliate links. Making inferences and predictions are highly related comprehension strategies. In fact, most books for teaching comprehension lump them together. For the younger ... Read More about Book List for Making Inferences and Predictions
Cultivate lifelong reading skills.
To love to read. As teachers, it's one of our basic, core wishes for our students. Some students come to us with a hunger for reading. Give them a thick novel (or better yet, let them bring their own) and they'll happily sit and read for as long as we allow. All day even. We can pretty much guarantee these students fall asleep at night with a book tented across their chest, having squeezed out as much of it as their droopy little eyes could handle. Other students "like" to read. And others "don't mind" reading, if they don't have anything better to do. Others will read at school but rarely do it at home. And still others avoid it like the plague. I want to share five ideas to help get all these other students reading more at home. To be clear, I agree with J.K. Rowling when she said, "If you don't like to read, you haven't found the right book." Helping students find the "right book" is irreplaceable. So the ideas that follow are meant to support this quest, not replace it. Concrete, fun tools to motivate students. 1. Personal Book Bracket You may have seen the idea of a book tournament, often done in the spring running parallel to March Madness, where books are selected and placed into a bracket-style tournament. Students then read some or all of the books and vote for the winners of each match-up. Why not streamline it into a personal book bracket? Give each student their own mini-bracket, maybe an 8-book tournament or even just a 4-book tournament, and let them choose the books. They can read the books at home and the bracket acts as a bit of fun motivation to complete a book and move on to the next one until all books in the bracket are read and the student can decide on their "champ." Be sure to grab the book bracket template you see below! And if students work on another book bracket afterward, you can even have them combine the two brackets so the champs from each bracket "compete" against each other to be the grand champ. 2. The Tower of Books Challenge Tower of Books is an engaging independent reading challenge, great for replacing a stuck-in-a-rut reading log. (You know the one... that chart with good intentions of ensuring students are consistently reading but eventually becomes a roll-of-the-eyes chore void of any student motivation. Yeah, that one.) The Tower of Books Challenge is based on two core ideas: to widen students' reading choices and to provide a fresh and motivating way to keep track of what they read. Students are given a reading list with numerous genres and categories of books they must read to meet the challenge. For each book students read, they create a book cut-out from the printable files, fill in their book information, and begin forming their… Tower of Books! Towers can be built with 3D book look-a-likes, each one representing a book read from the category list, or they can be built with 2D book spines. You can read more about my Tower of Books Challenge HERE, or check it out in my TpT shop HERE. 3. Book Connection Chain For students who like puzzles and solving codes, a Book Connection Chain might be just the motivation tool for them. The basic idea is to make connections between the books students read. The puzzle-solving part comes into play by having students connect the books they read in different ways AND to connect them into a loop. Look at the picture below. This chain used six picture books, connected in lots of different ways, from characters to plot events to genres, and more. Some connections are rather obvious and some are deeper. The tricky part is connecting the chain back on itself, completing the loop. It often takes moving the books around into different orders to get the connections to work. If they're clever, students usually don't need to select books with a certain connection in mind prior to reading them. Rather, they can read what they want, and then work on the connection chain afterward. Be sure to grab that connection chain template from the picture! 4. Top 5 Bookshelf For students who love lists, or who love to rank things, ask them to keep a "top 5 bookshelf" at home. In a Top 5 bookshelf, students keep their current five favorite books in one place in their home. If they don't own the book (if it's a library book, for instance), they just record the book title on a note card as a placeholder. The key is the changing nature of a favorite five books. As students read more books, their favorites can change, and their Top 5 shelf would change as well. You could even request students to snap a pic of their Top 5 Bookshelf to share with the class! 5. "Real Life" Book Clubs Book clubs or literature groups might already be part of your reading block schedule, but if so, they are often pretty full of expectations and assignments. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. But what I'm suggesting here is a type of book club that's meant to encourage more at-home reading, and to do that, I've found it helpful to mirror "real-life" book clubs, in which a group of people read the same book and then get together to chat about it. That's it. No extra assignments or tests or projects. Allowing students to form a small group with a book everyone involved wants to read can go a long way to building in some natural peer accountability. I've found it's helpful to set up some simple norms to help the group run smoothly but without mucking it up with a bunch of strict rules. For example: Set one reading assignment at a time and agree on it together. Do the reading before the group meets. Bring your book to the book club meeting. Mark one part of the reading that would be interesting to chat about. In my experience, informal book clubs like these hit some peaks and valleys with any particular class, and students themselves learn a lot about what works and what doesn't just through trying them out. Giving students the tools they need (like copies of the books and 15 minutes of time on Friday to have a book club meeting) and then stepping back is often is enough for them to figure the details out on their own, and can be a perfect jumping off point for more organized, "official" book clubs you use to incorporate into your reading instruction. * * * Want some tips to give to parents about how to support their child's reading at home? I've got a post full of practical tips and a handy printable brochure you can check out right HERE.
Are you trying to help your child learn to read? Use these five simple tips to point them in the right direction!
Well this was ironic!
This huge Reading Worksheet Printable Pack features 100 different printables for bookwork activities. There are both fiction and non-fiction printables that are able to be used with ANY TEXT which means that this pack can be reused all year round. There are SO many different activities which allow students to practice and develop many reading-related skills. They are great for developing comprehension which is one of the most important reading skills. Many of the activities also call for higher-order thinking. The printables cover: ♥ Story Elements – Setting, Plot, Characters, Problem, Solution, Sequence of Events. There are a number of diverse and creative activities. ♥ Reading Strategies – Inferring, predicting, summarizing, synthesizing, questioning, visualizing. ♥ Text Connections – Text-to-Self, Text-to-Text, Text-to-World ♥ Author Study – Author’s purpose, lesson, point-of-view, questions. ♥ Non-Fiction Texts - Main idea, Summarizing, Text Features, Diagrams, graphic organizers, learning reflection. ♥ Vocabulary Work – Finding word meanings, replacing “boring” words, finding interesting words. ♥ Nouns, Adjectives & Verbs – Generating adjectives for setting/character, finding these parts of speech within the text. Please see the preview for full view of printables!!! Includes both a US and an AUS/UK Version ♥♥♥ Follow me to be the first to hear about FREEBIES and updates ♥♥♥ ♥♥♥ Earn TPT Credits when you leave feedback ♥♥♥ I welcome and appreciate any feedback, comments or suggestions. You may also contact me on [email protected]
As you probably know, phonics is an essential component of reading instruction. Before you read this loooong post all about how to teach ph...
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Looking for even more short stories to read with your middle school and high school students? There are so many options out there, many of which can be used to teach a variety of literary elements and lead into interesting discussions and activities. Read on for 15 recommendations from secondary English Language Arts teachers.
Put these on your bucket list!
Cultivate lifelong reading skills.
Have you heard of the saying, "your fate is in your hands"? Well, here's a palm reading guide that will help you understand yourself and your future.
Love fantasy but tired of waiting years to find out how your favorite sagas end? Wait no more with this list of standalone fantasy books!
An Upper Elementary Collaborative blog written by 13 teachers. Includes teaching ideas and resources for grades 3, 4, and 5.
Cultivate lifelong reading skills.
This is a fun game to play with a pair of dice. Read a story and help recall the various features of the story with this creative activity.
Hey Ya'll! Today I'm going to share with you our adverb posters. We actually did these about 2 weeks ago and am just now getting around to sharing it with you. Adverbs are always so tricky for our little ones. To get started, we brainstormed a list of different types of adverbs onto our anchor chart. After reviewing these for a few days, some of my kiddos just weren't getting it. Of course, Amy from Step into Second Grade came to my rescue! She blogged about making adjective posters. I loved the idea so I decided to use them for adverbs instead. I printed out 4 verb pictures (eat, write, run, and sleep) and glued them onto butcher paper. I split my kids up into groups and had them rotate to each one. They had to write adverbs that described each picture. Was it perfect? No! Was every word spelled correctly? No! Was it effective? YES!!! This just seemed to click with my strugglers. They used the anchor chart posted above to help guide them. I didn't hear one conversation that didn't have to do with adverbs. It was fantastic! I displayed our final products underneath our whiteboard. They were so proud of their finished product. A lot of the same words were repeated but that is OK! Sometimes I get so caught up in the cuteness of things that are on TPT that I forget how effective the simple things can be.
Take a closer look.
Teaching reading comprehension is such a challenge! Learn how I revamped my reading instruction (and my reading block) to inspire HUGE change in my readers!
Check out how easy it is to use old iPhones as Listening Centers!
A pencil sketch that was created last fall as a joke between an autistic child from Newfoundland and his mother over her kicking his toy penguin has turned into a big hit on the web.
Steal these for your writing unit!
First grade anchor charts are great tools for reminding kids about concepts in math, writing, spelling, science, and more! Check out these great ideas.
Steal these for your writing unit!
These 4th grade anchor charts reinforce concepts for reading, science, math, behavior management, environmentalism, and more!
We as teachers know that reading at home is crucial to becoming a better reader.If you’re like me, you have used one of these. I used a reading log like this for years and didn’t think twice about it. However, I did think it was interesting that most of my students read exactly 30 minutes […]
The latest books and reading gadgets to make reading a fun, pleasant, and meaningful experience for casual and serious readers
Expanding Sentences Anchor Chart and Mini-Lesson
